I purchased the Mega Man Legacy Collection at full price on release day. I didn't need another repackaging of the six NES Mega Man games. I didn't need the art galleries; I've got a Mega Man art book already. I didn't need the music player; all the chiptunes are already on my computer and on CDs. Only the challenge mode promised anything new, and even that was a small consolation for effectively lighting $14.99 on fire in the hopes that Capcom would take notice if enough fans expressed continued monetary interest in the franchise. The MMLC is a great value for new fans, but it's a hard sell for the old ones.

What's saddening is that, once I'm done getting my money's worth out of the Legacy Collection, it's doubtful I'll ever go back to it. At least the Mega Man Anniversary Collection still has games I don't own on any other system...but even then, several of the collected games have serious presentation flaws, and the controls for the GameCube version take some getting used to. Capcom proved with the Mega Man X Collection that they know how to properly showcase a series, but I'm still waiting on a Classic compilation truly worthy of an anniversary or a legacy.

What might a Mega Man Legacy Collection done right look like? I'm so glad you asked.

On the front of the box:An original art piece with Mega Man front and center, posed heroically, with Rush, Eddie, Beat, and Tango bursting forth in action poses around him, the game's logo boldly below them. In the bottom-left corner are Dr. Light, Roll, and Auto looking hopefully toward our heroes. Shadowy, back-to-back figures of Proto Man and Bass can be seen in the bottom-right corner. The top-right corner is dominated by the castle from Mega Man 9, guarded by an intimidating-looking Yellow Devil, Mecha Dragon, and Mad Grinder. The top-left corner has Dr. Wily rocketing forward in his capsule from Mega Man 10, leading a swarm of flying enemies from various games in a massive charge toward the heroes.

On the back of the box:A cascade of illustrations forms a border along the edges, featuring Skull Man, Pump Man, Saturn, Guts Man, Junk Man, Dynamo Man, Splash Woman, Snake Man, Gravity Man, Buster Rod G, Crash Man, Punk, Search Man, Wind Man, and Konro Man. The bottom has all the obligatory warnings and credits you'd expect to find on the back of a box, but above those is an inviting description of what's inside:

20 games. Thousands of ways to play them. Choose a stage, conquer its guardian, and master their weapon. Test your mettle against the automated armies of Dr. Wily, the cutthroat creations of Dr. Cossack, the menacing machines of Mr. X, the stellar Stardroids, the grueling Genesis Unit, and even the devious Dimensions!Experience 25 years of Mega Man history exactly as you remember it...and like you've never seen it before!

Choose between 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit graphics and sound!

Unlock new characters and abilities—charge up your buster in Mega Man 10 or play as Proto Man in Mega Man 2!

Discover updated versions of these classic games in Mega Mode!

Acquire weapons from every game to use in a massive Endless Attack!

Explore a comprehensive character database and art gallery while listening to music from every game!

Push yourself to the limit with 50 Achievements, and go for a high score on the leaderboards!

A clean and simple title screen, in the same style as the one from Mega Man: Powered Up. Mega Man appears as the default mascot, but after beating each game in the collection, any of the main characters and Robot Masters from that game may randomly appear instead. A different character to greet you every time you fire up the collection!

The main menu then appears alongside the featured character, with the following options in a list: Games, Endless Attack, Leaderboards, Achievements, Database/Gallery, Jukebox. Looking at these in reverse order...

Jukebox:One huge list of tunes from every game in the collection, separated by game, with an option that lets you jump to the next game in sequence without needing to scroll through every tune individually. The jukebox can be used as a straight-up music player, but you can also build a playlist of one or more tunes to use as background music while navigating the various menus and perusing the database/gallery.

Database/Gallery:Basically the same as what's available in the Legacy Collection, but covering all the games present and combining the database and gallery to avoid duplication of artwork.

Achievements:I'm a firm believer in having Achievements that represent meaningful accomplishments and impel the player to experience the game in new ways, but without demanding anything so impossible or tedious that it's no longer fun. Here's what I'm thinking:

Beat each game in the collection (that's 20 Achievements right there).

Beat each game in the collection a second time, choosing a different first and last stage than before (another 20).

Beat any game without getting a Game Over.

Beat any game without dying.

Beat any game without using special weapons.

Beat any game using only special weapons.

Beat any game in under an hour.

Beat any game without using at-will recovery items or buying anything from the shop.

Beat any ten stages without taking damage.

Collect every nonrandom power-up in any game (i.e., all the 1-Ups, E-Tanks, etc. that are always in the same places).

End any boss battle in a draw (both you and the boss explode at the same time).

Survive 100 screens of any Endless Attack mode.

Leaderboards:In lieu of some of the more outrageous Achievements as seen in Mega Man 9 and 10, online leaderboards are used to track the most superhuman accomplishments players can muster. Your completion time, damage taken, and weapon accuracy are recorded for each game overall and each individual stage. In the case of Endless Attack mode, number of screens completed is the only thing tracked. As with the Legacy Collection, you can view replays of the top players' performances.

Endless Attack:Available after unlocking 40 Achievements. Like the Endless Attack modes in MM9 and 10, but with 500 areas mashing up challenges from every game in the collection.

Games:All 20 games in the collection are available from the get-go. MM1-10 are listed on the left half of the screen and the rest are listed on the right half, reserving the middle portion for a slideshow of screenshots from the currently highlighted game. Once a game is selected, an options box pops up. The default option is to launch the game in Classic Mode, which preserves the game as it was originally released, but you can throw that out the window right quick with the following options:

Available immediately:

Text: English, English (revised) [fixes all the typos and awkward line breaks], Japanese.

Fast Weapon Switching: Enable or disable use of the shoulder buttons to change weapons on the fly.

Charge SFX: A half-dozen choices for what noise the buster makes when it's charging up, from a constant hum to a little ripple to that weird woogle noise that Proto Man's buster makes. Maybe people will stop complaining now.

Available after unlocking the indicated number of Achievements:

(10) Energy Balancer: Enable or disable the automatic refill of weapon energy without switching weapons. In games where you can normally acquire an Energy Balancer, the item is part of your inventory from the beginning.

(20) Slide/Charge: Enable or disable one or both (charge style options include MM4, MM5, MM7, and MMIV). A few games have one or both options locked because those abilities are required to complete the game.

(30) Mega Mode: This mode presents an updated version of the game in question that streamlines any technical issues (rampant sprite flicker in MM2), incorporates the best parts of the different versions (finally, a definitive MM8 that combines the PS1 and Saturn perks), selectively implements unused content (basically making MM3 the game it was supposed to be), and generally polishes and improves on everything fans have been complaining about for decades, but without completely overhauling the game. The one exception is "Wily Tower," which acts as a standalone game in this collection; its Mega Mode is basically a brand-new game that adds a second fortress, incorporates challenges from every game in the collection, and allows you to choose weapons from any game you've beaten.

(50) Character Swap: Enable or disable the ability to switch to a different hero character at will (à la MMX7 and X8). Playable characters aside from Mega Man are Proto Man (rebalanced from MM9-10 so he's actually fun to play), Bass (same as in MM10), Roll (same as in Powered Up), Auto (no knockback; bazooka), and Kalinka Cossack (fast; boomerang hat). Select which two characters you'll use throughout the game; certain cutscenes will change to fit the character selected, which gets really silly in some games.

All the in-game options from the Legacy Collection (save states, video filters, etc.) are also available for all games.

I don't know about you, but I'd pay basically any price Capcom put on that collection. Even if we got a collection with half of those features (which is a far more feasible best-case scenario), longtime fans would finally be happy. Honestly, putting MM1-10 together in a single, no-frills package is really all Capcom needs to do to make longtime fans happy; doing anything to update the games would make us ecstatic. Leaderboards and art galleries and challenge modes are just gravy, and there's gotta be enough meat for that gravy to cover. With any luck, someday we'll have a complete meal of a collection that will satisfy us for years to come.

"You are not required to agree with everything you read. That is submission. But laughing at it and trying to understand something you do not concur with is called being sophisticated." –Greg Proops

Growing up, my English and history teachers were big on differentiating fact from opinion. Facts were irrefutable; opinions were up for discussion. The key to any debate, any essay, was presenting enough factual support for your opinions that your audience couldn't help but see things your way. My college religion professors added an extra layer to this by differentiating between Truth (big "T") and truth (little "t"), the former being a sort of cosmic fact and the latter being a kind of mortal opinion. To use a religious example, Truth is whether or not God actually exists, fact is whatever evidence we have on the subject, truth is whether we think God exists based on the facts, and opinion is whether ketchup belongs on mashed potatoes.

Society, in my experience, has gotten really good at arguing over ketchup like it's evidence for God.

What I mean is that fact and truth have largely fallen out of the conversation when it comes time to express feelings and pass judgment. I think of the posts I've seen on Facebook that discredit an entire belief system or group of people with a single scathing photo caption. It's the social media equivalent of a drive-by shooting; who's going to come limping after you when you've reduced their complex identity and well-founded beliefs to a punchline? And so we passively exchange potshots until the cleverer caption writer prevails, catching countless friends in the crossfire who were just popping in to post baby pictures.

I also think of the political debates I've seen in recent years, particularly this year's first Republican primary debate. I'm registered Independent; I'll listen to anyone who's got the chutzpah to run for President, but I confess that I had a hard time tolerating so much rhetoric and pageantry. The sheer number of participants on the stage transformed the debate into a zoo, leaving only enough time for each speaker to trumpet a few buzzwords before another elephant trampled over their response. The few people who made any effort to explain the facts and personal truths behind their opinions were the ones who held my attention, and whether or not I agreed with them, they were the ones I respected most.

My wife and I feel the same way about the Food Network shows we watch, such as Cutthroat Kitchen and Chopped, where contestants are judged by professional chefs and food critics on the meals they're forced to make within certain parameters. We cheer whenever chef and restaurateur Jet Tila shows up as a judge, because he's articulate in his feedback and consistent in the criteria he uses to render a verdict. In other words, he backs up his opinions with facts, and his explanations hint at a set of personal truths about cooking and competing that clearly inform his opinions.

This is why my wife and I became so disenchanted with Ramsay's Best Restaurant as the series went on. Sixteen of London's best-rated restaurants, representing eight different cuisines, competing head-to-head in a series of challenges that tested their mettle in circumstances both ordinary and extraordinary. The show started off well, showcasing the personalities of the people involved and highlighting the best and worst of their performance, but either the show's editor or celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay himself seemed intent on renaming the show Ramsay's Arbitrarily Best Restaurant.

Nevermind that any sense of fairness went out the window when the participants stopped being treated equally in the semi-finals, or that the show became preoccupied with everything the restaurants did wrong; Ramsay had consistently criticized one restaurant for trying too hard, then gave them the title of Best Restaurant because they tried so hard. Meanwhile, the other restaurant, which had performed spectacularly in almost every challenge, was deprived of the award with no explanation other than that they had "too much heart."

My wife and I were appalled. Yes, we had wanted the other restaurant to win, but the verdict, as far as we could tell, was completely unfounded. But Ramsay's opinion carries a lot of weight in the culinary world, so this flaky opinion that the one restaurant is better than the other might as well be Truth. Not that any of the previous verdicts were defended like a graduate thesis, mind you; Ramsay's descriptions of the food he sampled were typically limited to "delicious" and a few similarly subjective terms, and every vaguely explained decision was invariably "one of the toughest decisions I've ever had to make."

Opinions themselves aren't destructive; it's the way they're used and presented. "Your favorite movie sucks" is not the same as "I'm not a fan of romantic comedies to begin with, but I really don't get any sense of chemistry between Carrot Top and Judi Dench." And "this is the best restaurant in Britain" is not the same as "Gordon Ramsay, through a televised competition of unclear standards and dubious execution, determined that this is the best restaurant in Britain." Let's be clear where we're coming from when we talk, and let's examine the facts before we call people out on their opinions. Let's be sophisticated.

Dramatic, I know. But if you've heard or read anything I've said about the modern state of Star Trek, Mega Man, Metroid, or any of my other favorite entertainment franchises, you know I've become bitter. Like I'm the only fan who cares about integrity, continuity, coherence. We can't just make sequels and prequels and interquels anymore. Everything has to be a reboot, even if it isn't technically a reboot. Everyone has to tell a story on their own terms, even if that means tearing down the foundations that have held a series together. Modern entertainment is selfish, nearsighted, and usually terribly written, but that didn't stop me from getting excited about Jurassic World when I saw the first advertisement for it.

Jurassic Park is my favorite movie of all time. It's been my favorite movie since I first saw it in the theater with my mother back in 1993. I've written about why I love it, but in short: Dinosaurs! As any child will tell you, dinosaurs (if not ninjas or robots) are the coolest thing in the world. Jurassic Park perfectly evokes those childlike feelings of awe and wonder, followed by utter horror and helplessness as things spiral out of control, which ultimately gives way to a mature admiration and respect for these fearsome creatures. No matter how old I get, the movie never fails to make me feel like a kid again, and by the end of it, I've grown up a little more, just as the characters have.

The sequels don't come close to duplicating the quality of the first movie, but they're at least reasonable continuations of the story. Despite some moments where I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief, I like Jurassic Park III (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni go a long way in improving my opinion of any movie). I tolerate The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Jeff Goldblum and a rampaging T. rex go a long way in improving my opinion of any movie). With nearly 15 years' distance from the last installment and a two-sequel precedent of "generic action movie" to follow from, Jurassic World had every excuse to be a disappointment.

I left the theater in tears. But for the first time since maybe 2009, when a layer of ice shaped like J.J. Abrams started to cover my heart, those were tears of joy. Jurassic Park was the one thing—and I mean the one thing—left in the entertainment world that I held dear that nobody had messed with, and Jurassic World brought it back with the kind of care and dignity that, pardon the irresistibly obvious pun, I thought were extinct.

Jurassic World remembers where it came from. It understands what makes the first movie so much more popular than the next two. It caters to a new generation of fans without leaving the old ones behind, also capitalizing on the current popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Chris "Star-Lord" Pratt and Vincent "Kingpin" D'Onofrio playing key roles. Touchstones to the first movie are everywhere, and they're not just there for the audience; they play an important role in the story—a story that recaptures that childlike wonder, offers up some fresh scares, and thoughtfully explores the possibilities of a successful park filled with dinosaurs. Jurassic World reboots the franchise without severing ties to continuity, and it clearly has a plan for where it wants to go from here...but if this is the last Jurassic film we ever get, it's not a bad stopping point, either.

That's not to say I wouldn't change some things. The film is about 10 minutes too slow, getting hung up in the beginning on multiple introductions that could have been condensed or conveyed through other means. There's a hint of romance that doesn't necessarily take away from the movie, but that could have been excised for the welcome novelty of having a male and female character not end up together after spending a whole 90 minutes with each other. One character gets killed off in a particularly gratuitous fashion that befits an especially vile villain, but not an unassuming person just trying to help. John Williams' unforgettable Jurassic Park score is back in full force, but the new music tends to meander, and the score as a whole sometimes overshoots or undershoots the tone of a scene.

Still, these are shortcomings I can live with. Changing them wouldn't change the fundamental character of the film. Jurassic World breaks new ground without desecrating the old, and it does so with style and love. That's what I want out of a sequel. I sat through the whole credits with a grin on my face, wiping the joyful tears from my eyes, remembering just how good it feels for one of my favorite things in the entertainment world to make me happy for a change.

I recently finished watching Cheers, the long-running sitcom about the colorful staff and patrons of the titular Boston bar, which was a staple in American households throughout the mid-'80s into the early '90s. I say "finished," but the more accurate version of the truth is that my viewing experience was a wine flight of television with a few of the glasses swapped out for whole bottles.

My wife and I sat down to watch through all of Cheers together—a commitment of 100+ hours of viewing time—partly as another comedy show to add to our Netflix rotation, partly because of my interest in the pop cultural value, and partly because the show Frasier (top contender for my favorite sitcom, which I intended to watch through next) takes place in the same universe as Cheers (and, incidentally, Wings). I'm a sucker for in-universe crossovers and continuity, so knowing Cheers was where Frasier Crane made his debut was enough extra encouragement to make the show our Next Big Viewing Project.

The first season was superb. Memorable characters, witty jokes, and plenty of personality. As we moved on to the second season, the show was still enjoyable, but more and more of the jokes and plotlines were new spins on old material, and the turbulent romance between the two lead characters left us aggravated as often as entertained. As the third season unfolded, "sitcom syndrome" had set in—the wretched curse of miscommunication, deceit, and awkward situations blowing situations out of proportion for allegedly humorous effect. My wife and I have a low tolerance threshold for this kind of comedy. Despite my wife's shared interest in seeing Frasier before Frasier, the character was only a bit player at this point in the series, and even his high-minded psychobabble wasn't enough to salvage the show for her. By the fourth season, I was watching solo.

Unlike my wife, who insists on watching every episode of a series in order, I have no compunction about skipping over any episodes that don't look particularly appealing. Most series I watch on Netflix are for self-education, not story; I want a cursory, yet meaningful, exposure to popular and culturally significant television. I'm in it for the expanded repertoire of things I can write and talk about; any fun I have is just a bonus. I'll start with the first and end with the last episode of a series, and I'll pick out one or two of the most important-looking episodes from each season in-between. If the show is worth my time, I'll start picking out a few more episodes of interest here and there. If I'm hooked by the time I get to the end, I'll go back and fill in the gaps with some or all of the episodes I skipped. Such was the case with Cheers.

Skimming through the episode descriptions, there were entire seasons that looked intolerable. Rebecca, a main character introduced halfway through the series, brought down the show for me—shallow, self-involved, opportunistic, unqualified as a manager, the perpetual target of men's sexual advances, and nervously psychotic, I struggled to find any redeeming qualities to make me like her whenever she wasn't making me laugh. I focused on the episodes centered around Frasier, which carried me past whole story arcs that reeked of sitcom syndrome. Nearing the end of the series, I was ready to give Cheers three stars out of five; the show was never bad, but the best parts kept getting nullified by the tedious parts I had to power through.

I got to the final episode, technically a three-parter, which was touted as one of the most memorable finales in television history. I paused. On an individual basis, yes, these episodes really did average out to three stars in my book. Yet, after a generous sampling, I wasn't quite ready to finish this off and remove it from the queue—and that's the mark of a four- or five-star series. I sprang back to where I left off in Season 4 and spent a weekend marathoning just about every episode that looked amusing or important. Which still left out huge chunks of Rebecca's romantic story arcs. But when I had circled back to the final three episodes, I was glad I'd taken the extra time to get to know this series better. I felt a sense of satisfaction in the conclusion that would have been missing otherwise.

In the midst of all the unnecessary angst and disaster that characterize so much of the show, there are key moments of character development and genuinely clever comedy that make Cheers worth watching. There are recurring themes and running gags and little nuances that make the characters endearing beyond the scope of an individual episode. The fact that people recognize Norm wherever he goes. Cliff's side comments that paint an increasingly bizarre picture of his personal life. Carla's late-night heart-to-hearts with Sam. The ever-escalating rivalry between Cheers and Gary's Olde Towne Tavern. My wife is right: You miss these kinds of things if you speed through a show.

In watching these characters develop and their relationships flower, flourish, and wither—and not necessarily in that order—I also gained a renewed appreciation for how easily my wife and I fell in love. I didn't spend years trying to charm her into giving me a chance; she didn't move off to Canada just as our relationship was getting started; we didn't wait until we were standing at the altar to start considering the ramifications of being together for the rest of our lives. We got acquainted through our social circles, got to talking one night and found we had a lot in common, began hanging out together more, started dating, put some heavy thought into getting engaged, got engaged, got married, stayed married. So far, neither of us has turned out to be an inside trader on the run from the law, or a womanizing scumbag, so we're in excellent shape in terms of Cheers relationships. As long as I don't join the ice show and my wife doesn't have her pictures taken by a French photographer, we should be able to expect several more seasons together without manufactured drama.

Not that life is always rainbows and kittens in the absence of a diminutive, underage boss effectively making us choose between dating him and keeping our jobs, but we aren't constantly lying, making under-the-table deals with people, and escaping from underground Eco-Pods to hold our marriage together. Maybe that makes us boring. Still, I'm grateful that when we talk about going our separate ways, we're only ever referring to one of us jumping ship on a TV show we started watching together. And that last episode of Cheers? I'd say it's one of the most famous sitcom finales in television history because, for once, we saw the characters for who they really were—people, not punchlines—and they were as truly relatable as the friends with whom we'd share a drink in real life.

After my first post about Mass Effect and my second post about Mass Effect 2, this third post about Mass Effect 3 was inevitable. From both a storytelling and a gameplay standpoint, I've found the Mass Effect games to be simultaneously brilliant and deeply flawed—a perfect combination for my analytical propensities. Having spent something on the order of 140 hours across the last four months in the combat boots of Commander Jane Shepard, I've had omni-gel, turians, dialogue wheels, and planet-scanning on the brain almost constantly. Just as the final installment of this epic sci-fi FPS/RPG-hybrid trilogy is supposedly the culmination of everything that came before it; so, too, is this post. Everything right and everything wrong with the series can be summed up by this one game, which has its fair share of unique ups and downs, to boot.

There will be spoilers. There will be screenshots. There will be no mercy.

By now I've learned that the hardest part of any Mass Effect game is getting it to work properly in the first place. Imagine my surprise when I found that ME3 booted up with no issues (giving me back the option to skip through the opening credits!), recognized my EA/Origin account without prompting, and located my final save file from ME2 right off the bat. I poked through the game settings and found everything to be organized and sensible. I perused the user-friendly DLC list—now integrated into the game itself instead of on some random web page that opens up—and immediately knew what I did and did not have installed. I hadn't made it past the main menu yet, and already this was the greatest game in the series.

The game allowed me to live out this delightful delusion for a whole five minutes before reminding me that BioWare, or EA, or somebody responsible for this series really doesn't care about making a game that works. So ME3 successfully located my ME2 save file, right? When I loaded the game, I was prompted to confirm that my character's imported appearance and selected class were still satisfactory. Let's compare how she looked in ME2 with ME3, and you tell me if this is satisfactory:

Wait, I'll answer for you. The answer is no. Even after fixing the most egregious errors with her hair and skin tone, she still only resembled a vague memory of my Commander Shepard. Between the lighting of the character customization screen playing tricks with my color-blindness, some slight graphical touch-ups (I think they tried to make the eyes more realistic, for one thing), and the nearly imperceptible differences between certain levels of cheek gaunt and eye depth, I had a heck of a time fixing her up. Eventually settling for "looks wrong, but close enough," I grudgingly conceded that I didn't care enough to spend another 20-30 minutes on this and started the game. No wonder it took Miranda two years to rebuild Shepard!We'll gloss over the part where I downloaded a savestate editor to continue tweaking her appearance well into Hour 10 of the game, reloading ME2 to get visual confirmation that I was on the right track. Realizing I'd given her the wrong haircut was a huge breakthrough.

Almost as if ME3 had glimpsed into the future to read my complaints about the beginning of ME2, it took no time at all for the game to start winning my heart back. The opening cutscene promptly reunites Shepard with two old friends and offers decisions that still feel like they make a difference despite having no real impact on the end result of the cinematic segment. The cutscene dropped me off in the middle of a war zone, but I had ample time to check my configuration settings and reacclimate to the controls. They kept the HUD from ME2—still not my favorite way to select weapons, but the fact that I could see Shepard's health and shield meters at all times was a clear improvement. The in-game menu had been redesigned once again, but this time made sense: shrink the Exit Game button and move it down into the corner where you won't hit it by accident; merge the Journal and Codex entries into a single page with multiple tabs to reduce clutter. Keep everything else where it was in the last game. Good golly, someone who knows something about sequel design was on this project.

I noticed we were still using the thermal clip system, and that I had precious little ammo for my pistol. A few enemies later, I had no ammo for my pistol, and my squadmate encouraged me to swat at enemies with my bare hands. To my surprise, hand-to-hand combat wasn't a last resort; it was...fun. I didn't even need to put my weapon away to start thwacking bad guys; once I restocked on ammo, I found I could seamlessly alternate between shooting and clobbering. I think I might've punched something once in the last game. Suddenly this was a meaningful game mechanic, and it got even better when I found I could coup-de-grâce an enemy from behind or wrestle my way out of a grapple with it. Throw in some obligatory practice with climbing ladders and leaping over pits—more new actions the game taught me to do in the intro mission—and the gameplay felt fresh enough to sustain me through another 40+ hours of probably mostly just hiding behind boxes.

They took out the hacking minigames—safecracking, decoding, and unlocking no longer require any effort other than standing around for a moment as Shepard's omni-tool does all the work. One more unique element of the series to be eliminated. I was a little sad to see the puzzle sequences disappear—if you use them sparingly and provide enough concessions to struggling players, minigames can be a welcome injection of variety to the gameplay—but there's already enough complexity with the core gameplay that one more mechanic might be unwelcome. Unfortunately, that's a sentiment that is exemplified by the game's expansions to your movement abilities.

Initially, I was excited to be able to execute commando rolls BECAUSE I COULD. In no time, I was also activating doors and control panels, pressing myself up against a surface to take cover, easily darting back and forth between cover, leaping over low cover, shimmying around corners, disengaging myself from hiding behind cover, engaging in conversation with people, picking up objects, resuscitating fallen squadmates, and breaking into a sprint...all with the same button. There comes a point when a multifunction button is too multifunctional, and having about a dozen actions contextually mapped to the same button is officially overkill. All too often, Shepard interpreted my commands to run away from the enemy as permission to commando-roll into a hail of bullets. What an inspiration to the N7 program.

The HUD didn't help matters. On far too many occasions, clicking the icons on my heads-up display seemed to do something, but in fact, did nothing when I returned to battle. It's possible my pulse was pounding so hard from the action that I accidentally started to drag the icons around (as though to drop them into a hotkey slot) instead of actually clicking them. But when a split-second can mean the difference between taking out a charging Banshee and getting reaped, you cannot afford to lose a few moments wondering when Shepard is going to get around to swapping that empty sniper rifle for a loaded shotgun, or tossing a grenade instead of standing around like a practice dummy. If you're going to deny me the ability to switch weapons or use powers because, say, my current character animation needs to finish first, it wouldn't be unreasonable to put my commands in a queue, ghost the buttons I can't use right now, or change the existing "I can't let you do that, Dave" beep so it's not indistinguishable from the confirmation blip and inaudible over the din of combat.Moreover, at the start of every mission, and randomly following certain cutscenes, my weapon selections reset themselves. Have a chilling SMG and incendiary pistol prepared in advance of an enemy attack? Not anymore! Now let's spend the next 30 seconds reactivating ammo powers for each individual weapon. It didn't help that my ammo powers spontaneously rearranged themselves on the HUD multiple times throughout the game, which led to instinctive clicking in spots that no longer did what I thought they did. Or that the cutscenes had a penchant for making Shepard appear with a weapon she didn't even bring with her on the mission, causing further confusion about the state of my arsenal. Or that, anytime I reloaded a previous save after dying, the game brought me back with the combat powers I had active or recharging...at the time of death.What this all adds up to is a robust combat system that's irritatingly uncooperative. Not being able to trust that you can heal your teammates or bust out a special attack at the exactly the moment you decide is highly disruptive to any game experience, let alone one centered around fast-paced tactical combat. By the end of the game, my clicks on the HUD and my interactions with people and objects on the battlefield were slow and deliberate; I was tired of the Alliance coroners having to list "unreliable interface" on their reports as Shepard's cause of death. That's not how I wanted to play this game.

Come to think of it, "that's not how I wanted to play this game" sums up a lot of my experience here.By the time you get to ME3, millions are dying by the hour across the galaxy, and there's never any shortage of ships and soldiers begging for immediate assistance. Haste is critical, it would seem. Yet the level design favors huge open spaces, asymmetrical rooms with multiple entrances, and barren-looking dead-ends, all of which are filled with credits, quest items, weapon upgrades, and story points that you can never come back for once the mission is over. Thorough exploration seems to be equally critical...but exploration takes time. The story and gameplay are out of sync: an oppressive sense of urgency and treasure-filled nonlinear level design send mixed messages about how to play.

That's fine if there are clear in-game advantages to both approaches: a choice, if you will, between coming to the rescue on time or letting the galaxy burn because papa needs a new pair of Hanhe-Kedar greaves. But as far as I can tell, you are the only one who doesn't survive if there's ever a situation where time actually matters. No need to rush through a mission on account of the dying scientists; the one you need to talk to will still be there in an hour, and her colleagues are scripted to die no matter what at specific points in the level. Once I figured that out, I started drowning out the emotional cries for help from people in peril. Though my allies urged me to get moving a few times, I rarely felt any sense that poking around the rubble for a few extra minutes was jeopardizing the fate of anybody. Except me and my sense of immersion in the game, that is.

I wanted to be immersed. I fondly recall the first time I stepped up to the galaxy map in ME1. That whoosh of the camera panning in over Shepard's head, the beautifully atmospheric music, the awe-inspiring complexity and vastness of outer space—I was there. Even after ME2 instituted the obtrusive fuel consumption mechanic, gliding around the galaxy was still a treat thanks to all gorgeous planets and their interesting text descriptions. Exploration was a joy.

In ME3, I was lucky to have two minutes of exploration before being flushed out of any given star system by mood-breaking game mechanics. This time, you send out scanning pulses to detect things of interest, but in Soviet Star System, things of interest detect you! A swarm of reapers descends on your location after as few as 2-3 scanning pulses...and most systems have 2-3 secrets to be found. If you don't retreat, you'll die. If you don't take notes about where you've scanned, you're liable to come back after a completing a full-length mission (the only way to drive off the reapers) and waste your opportunity scanning in places you forgot you already had. I don't mind a proper stealth mission, but this one turns relaxing exploration into an unforgiving guessing game that only serves to delay or deter 100% completion.

The interruptions didn't end there. Most of the fuel depots around the galaxy have been destroyed, leaving you to salvage fuel from their debris...assuming you can find any debris with your scanning pulse. There's no way to tell how much fuel you'll recover until you click the button to investigate the wreckage—which can't actually be identified as wreckage and not some other mystery object until you click the button--at which point you automatically gain however much fuel is there. Even if you can't use it all. "HAHA, I'M SO GREEDY, TAKING ALL THIS FUEL WHEN I'M MAXED OUT!" said no one ever. It is incredibly easy to overlook or blindly waste such a crucial commodity, leaving you no recourse but to constantly yo-yo back and forth between the Citadel to refuel and the next star system you want to get promptly kicked out of.

Side note to developers: When you show the same cutscene every time the player transitions from one major area of the map to the next, please don't use the most outrageously loud sound effect you can find. Scrambling to reach the volume knob every time I go through a mass relay kinda takes me out of the moment.﻿Additional side note to developers:Increasing the font size of the already fairly verbose planet description text so that no more than six words, most of which are preposterously lengthy to begin with, have even the slightest, most remote possibility of fitting on a single line is a bad idea, especially when you have so much text that you'll wear out your mouse's scroll wheel reading everything for one planet, let alone a whole galaxy's worth.I mean, who's going to bother reading any of this when it takes so much effort to digest just one sentence?﻿Needless to say, it wasn't long before I kept a walkthrough handy at all times to minimize the amount of fruitless scanning attempts, wasted fuel pickups, and tedious backtracking. I gave up on visiting nonessential planets just to read about them. It sucked the soul out of the exploration, but that was a favorable alternative to letting the exploration suck the soul out of me. Two can play at that game, Soviet Star System.Choosing between immersion and completionism was not the kind of decision-making I had signed up for, but if I was already looking at a walkthrough, I might as well go all the way. I recognized that this might be the only time I'd ever play through the series—and if I gave it another chance later on, it'd be as a male Renegade instead—so I wanted to ensure I didn't skip anything significant. Now, ME3 is generally very good at keeping the player pointed in the right direction: thoughtfully labeled maps, clear mission descriptions, popup identification of key objects and people, and on-demand guidance to the next objective make it largely unnecessary to use a walkthrough. That is, if you trust the game to make it physically possible to complete everything without outside assistance.Whereas the first two games let you complete side missions at any time, ME3 puts bizarre time frames on when you're able to do things. Sometimes you get a sidequest and it's too early to start it—you're supposed to go to the Hades Nexus, but the Hades Nexus isn't even on your galaxy map yet, and it won't show up until sometime in the future when there's no good reason for it to suddenly appear. Sometimes you finish a Priority mission that advances the main storyline, and suddenly an unrelated sidequest is inexplicably impossible to complete. It's often impossible to tell whether you're too early, too late, not looking hard enough...or whether the mission has been silently rendered unwinnable by a glitch that still hasn't been addressed despite being well-documented, more than two years old, and on a platform that can be patched at any time. No self-respecting completionist would abstain from spoiling the game with a walkthrough under those conditions.

Another thing the game withholds from you is what, exactly, the Galactic Readiness Rating is that's displayed on the main menu screen, and how to increase it. It turns out that it dictates the point value of your War Assets—the people and resources you accumulate to get a better ending—and you can increase it by continuing the fight for the galaxy across three other games. These are Mass Effect: Infiltrator (a game for smartphones, therefore I can't play it), the game's multiplayer mode (which is unwinnable without human companions, therefore I can't play it), and an online minigame where you deploy imaginary fleets on invisible missions every one, three, or five hours (which I can "play," if that's the right term for this obligatory waste of time that's only interesting the first couple times you try it). Conceptually, I like the notion that ME3 is so expansive that my actions in completely different games can actively contribute to my success or failure in this one. What bothers me is that it's presented more like a requirement than a bonus. "Look at all these War Assets you've acquired! Too bad we're docking you 50% of their full point value because you're too cheap to buy our Android game."

I can see where these things could make the single-player experience more immersive for the smartphone-carrying social media generation of gamers, but I am not one of them. Logging into the N7 website before and after every session of ME3 to boost my Galactic Readiness Rating was annoying. And ME3 annoyed me plenty.Nonstop voiceover advertisements harassing me as I was trying to shop. Shepard's inconsolably depressive state after the mission on Thessia—which, in the wake of so many equally bad things that failed to elicit that response, seems extremely out-of-character. That massacred colony where we're supposed to feel bad that these innocent, defenseless people were apparently murdered in their home while relaxing and watching television...with their corpses dressed in full combat gear. And that's to say nothing of the game eventually crashing at startup 20% of the time, or booting me out to the desktop another 20% of the time because it claimed the Origin client, which was totally up and running, was no longer up and running.

I want to give ME3 credit for what it does well: Handling the gritty and "adult" elements of ME2 with the maturity and elegance of ME1. Loading screens and cutscene transitions that seamlessly blend into the gameplay. Truly breathtaking cinematic moments, like the awesomely action-packed climax on Tuchanka and the incredibly tense final push across enemy lines on Earth. Player-friendly equipment screens. A streamlined shopping system that even allows you to do all your shopping from a single terminal (at a modest markup, of course) if you don't feel like backtracking to stores located who-knows-where. Squadmates showing up in different places around the Normandy and the Citadel, like they're real people who aren't tethered to a post.ME3 attempts to improve upon ME2 while bringing back some of the best aspects of ME1, and it is tremendously successful. But not entirely successful.

All throughout ME1 and 2, my Commander Shepard was a generally noble and good-hearted person who could see the occasional shade of gray and, in rare circumstances, be vindictive when somebody really ticked her off. In ME3, every decision was either pure good or pure evil; all my neutral options had been taken away. "Hm...do I help this person out of the goodness of my heart, or stab them in the face for asking?" Especially when Paragon and Renegade points contribute equally to filling up a single morality meter (instead of two separate meters like before), denying you dialogue options if you're not exclusively one or the other, that's like having no choice at all. The completionist isn't allowed to settle for "Paragon enough": Despite all the extra points I gained from the DLC and all the multipliers my special abilities gave me, I wasn't quite good enough to pick the final Super Good Guy dialogue option of the game. All because I allowed Shepard to be a real person and get angry or sarcastic two or three times out of hundreds of opportunities to stop doing the right thing all the time.

This points to a larger problem with ME3 and the trilogy as a whole: All of your choices matter...but at the same time, none of your choices matter. The complexities of shipboard romance live up to the notion that your choices have a cumulative effect throughout the series. The influence your decisions have over who lives and dies should not be understated. Strip away the people, and the game plays out the same way: the Citadel still gets attacked, the quarians still try to retake their home planet, and Earth is still where the galaxy makes a last stand against the reapers. The finer details are up for grabs, but you cannot change the momentum of the story. Mass Effect masterfully gets lost in the minutiae.

Killed the rachni queen in ME1, did you? Doesn't matter; the reapers made an artificial queen so you can still have a mission in ME3 where you have to fight her. Destroyed the genophage cure in ME2, eh? Well, I guess you won't be gaining the krogan as allies in ME3! Unless someone conveniently develops a cure when the krogan ask for it. You'll get different dialogue and see slightly different cutscenes depending on how you've conducted yourself and who's left standing around you, but your friends are interchangeable. If the plot hinges around one specific person who got bumped off in the last game, somebody else will take their place to keep the story moving. The fate of the galaxy is never really in your hands; the best you can hope to do is add flavor to an ultimately linear journey.

I let the Council die at the end of ME1. I denied Udina his rise to power at the start of ME2. I didn't just think I was reshaping the political landscape of the Mass Effect universe; I demanded it. Galactic leadership was ineffective, and I had the ability to change it. Perhaps this is a sly commentary on politics, but the new Council was indistinguishable from the old one, Anderson was even less useful than before, and my vote against Udina didn't stop him from taking over in ME3. Even when I cured the genophage to gain the support of the krogan—despite an ultimatum from the salarian leader that I would lose the support of her people—the salarians helped me anyhow. At what point were my decisions going to "have profound consequences on the action and the story" like the game box promised me?

In the end, every choice that does make a difference in the bigger picture is nothing more than a War Asset to be gained or lost. Choose to accept that sidequest and rescue a holy relic that inspires an alien race. Choose between saving a salarian commando or saving the hanar homeworld from destruction. It's all a numbers game with a veneer of intergalactic importance. Everything has a point value, and that's all that counts as far as the gameplay is concerned. It doesn't matter whether you take on the reapers with the combined might of the entire galaxy or a newscasting army of 700 Diana Allers clones; they'll both get you the same results. All it takes to win is making enough choices; they don't have to be good ones.

That's the ultimate disappointment of the Mass Effect trilogy: Contrary to what everyone else on the Internet has ever said, nothing you do actually makes a difference until the very last choice of the very last game. That's why I liked the ending to ME3 (a few minor quibbles notwithstanding): for the first time in the series, I knew I was making an impact that would be felt beyond the halls of the Citadel or ::ahem:: the walls of Shepard's quarters. All the times before when I thought I was massively effecting change in the galaxy, I was just populating the inflexible story arc of the next game with cameos by the people I saved. If I were fully engrossed in the narrative, that might be enough for me. But Mass Effect refused to let me forget it was a game, and as such, I expected more than thank-you notes at my message terminal from the people I saved.

I've gone back and read some of the previews and interviews. Mass Effect was not a runaway hit that spawned two unexpected sequels; it was a trilogy from the very beginning. There was a story arc in place before the first game was even released. There was a technical arc planned, gradually expanding on the weapons and vehicles in the same fashion as the story. Mass Effect had the overwhelming potential to be one complex, incredible game split into three acts. Instead, we got three separate games with a thread of common history running through them.One of the joys of a long Dungeons & Dragons campaign is nurturing your fledgling level 1 character into an unstoppable epic-level super-warrior over the course of the adventure. How meticulously I planned my characters in ME1, leveling them up with the expectation of building on those skills throughout the next two games. How little it mattered when ME2 wiped the slate clean with a brand-new set of abilities to build up from scratch, and when ME3 made me retrain most of those same abilities all over again. My specific choices didn't matter; only the fact that I had leveled up enough to make so many choices, for which I was rewarded with a few bonus points to put toward leveling up at the start of the next sequel.

How many hours I spent scouring planets in ME1 for raw materials to build a stronger human navy. How wasteful that time felt when I reached ME2 and found my tedious efforts translated into a starting boost to my personal resource pool, which needed no such assistance thanks to my misguided prospecting spree later on. How extra wasteful that time felt when ME3 converted my excessive stockpile of resources into a War Asset worth 100 points—respectable, to be sure, but depressing when I started thinking about how much of my life went into that drop in the bucket. I never got to see those raw materials going to good use with the fleet. Well, aside from upgrading a few of the Normandy's systems in ME2 (which, admittedly, had a direct impact on the outcome of that game):Everybody survived the suicide mission in ME2. Even so, nobody joined me as a squadmate in ME3 who wasn't with me in ME1. Not Grunt, not Jack, not anyone. Fat lot of good those loyalty missions did.At least I got to fight alongside them again in the Armax Arsenal Arena, a place that became available with the truly wonderful Citadel DLC. I will say that the downloadable content made ME3. Several hours in, I decided I was enjoying the game enough (yes, really) to justify splurging a little on the story-related DLC, which gave me a cool mystery to unravel, an intriguing new squadmate (AND HIS WEAPON, WHICH DOESN'T USE THERMAL CLIPS AND MERELY OVERHEATS LIKE SPACE GUNS ARE SUPPOSED TO), and an awesome heap of hilarity and replay value. Hunting for Leviathan fleshed out parts of the story that had been sorely missing. Javik's unique perspective on the galaxy was refreshing. Busting a gut while taking on thugs with nothing but a pistol and a party dress felt like playing No One Lives Forever all over again. Not only is the DLC a much-needed breath of fresh air from the emotionally draining story and the endless mobs of Cerberus troopers, but it's responsible for at least half my favorite memories of the game. Storming the archives with every surviving squadmate I'd ever had was one of the highlights of my FPS career.

No matter how it may seem from my criticisms, I've largely enjoyed my time with Mass Effect. The first installment alone establishes a universe with the kind of depth that takes other franchises years to develop. I've rarely played anything with such a cinematic feel and such beautiful graphics. Many of the characters are interesting; the voice acting is top-notch; the balance of FPS and RPG elements is unique; the way the finer details of the story reflect your choices is often quite neat. Individually, each game is good, if not very good.

As a trilogy, however, Mass Effect is a mass of wasted potential. I fully appreciate people's great admiration for this series because of what it does accomplish, but I'm jaded because I've seen it all before.

I pursued romantic relationships in Star Trek: Elite Force 2. I fought to gain the trust and loyalty of my allies in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. I had my choices come back to help or hurt me in the trial scene of Chrono Trigger. I ran into some aliens in Metroid Fusion who I'd had the option to rescue in Super Metroid. I raced against the clock to gather resources increasing my odds of success in Mega Man X5. I created a custom character who'd stick with me through the whole series in Quest for Glory. Mass Effect just offered more of those things.

What it did not offer, however, was the kind of game-changing decision-making I expected after playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight III. I got a different story, a different final boss, and allies who would either fight with me or against me in the final mission, depending on how I resolved the one and only conflict where I had to make a choice between good and evil. I was spoiled by a game where 100% of the decision-making radically impacted both the ending and the gameplay. Did I even get 1% out of Mass Effect? I'll know for sure when I someday replay the trilogy as a Renegade, but I assume I'll still be disappointed when I can't follow through on the "we don't need help from aliens" human supremacist route that ME1 teases and ME3 seems to rule out entirely.Still, Mass Effect was worth playing. ME1 is rough around the edges, ME2 sands off those rough edges with a grenade, and ME3 isn't really designed for people like me, but I found enough enjoyment in the characters and core gameplay to press on through all the little things that detracted from the experience. I like ME1, 2, and 3 well enough on their own merits, but they did a lousy job of keeping me immersed, and they make for a disappointing trilogy.Commit to your unique game mechanics, keep the tone consistent, harmonize the gameplay with the story, don't settle for letting the fan community address your game-breaking glitches, don't go making radical changes unless there is something wrong to be fixed, and never deprive the player of their ability to shape the game experience to their liking. Then we can talk about building a series where everything you do—on every level, from story to gameplay—makes a difference.

I was really hoping I wouldn't have a reason to write a sequel to this post.

After 40-odd hours of genuine enjoyment dampened repeatedly and consistently by obtrusive repetition, excessive filler, and issues with the interface, I have beaten Mass Effect. In terms of atmosphere, story, characters, graphics, sound effects, voice acting, customizability, replay value, and originality, I give the game high marks. Regarding the gameplay, the RPG elements are pretty solid, but far too much of the game is spent doing fetch quests and redundant challenges that seem only to superficially extend the length of the game, and there's an overemphasis on micromanagement that's especially incongruous with the relatively straightforward combat. From a technical standpoint, there's a lot of room for improvement with the controls, menus, ambient audio, and general reliability of commonplace actions to not glitch the game.

In short, Mass Effect's problems are numerous, more disappointing than offensive, and easy enough to iron out. With more varied and meaningful sidequests, a lower frequency of random equipment drops that prompt the player to reassess their entire team loadout, more complex combat that takes full advantage of the "hiding behind cover" mechanic, and a thorough streamlining of the technical issues, Mass Effect could be every bit as amazing as it has the potential to be. That's why I had so much hope for Mass Effect 2: the original game was already on the path to perfection; all the designers had to do was clear a few obstructions from the path.

Or, y'know, they could veer off into the woods in search of another path to perfection.

When I started writing this post a couple weeks ago, I was ready to jettison ME2 out the nearest airlock. Everything about the game felt wrong, like the developers viewed the whole first game as a mistake but felt obligated to stay in the same story continuity. Coming back to this post some 30 hours into the game, I struggled to find that same indignation that prompted me to start writing in the first place. I'd gotten over the initial shattering of expectations and dissatisfaction with the new direction; I still recognized a number of flaws, but I was becoming numb to them, and I couldn't deny how much of the game I found to be enjoyable. Perhaps this was a classic case of player expectations giving a good game a bad rap, something I'd be ashamed to admit after criticizing the gaming community so frequently for doing the same. Now that I've finished the game, I find that my gut was right and I have no reason to reconsider the title of this post.

Once again, the problems began even before I started playing. ME1 (and practically every other computer game I've ever played) lets you skip the game company credits that flash by when the game first boots up; ME2 forces you to sit through them every time. Fine, I'll wait. But a moment after arriving at the main menu screen, a window popped up asking me to log in to some account I didn't have and to provide the software key to get the game's downloadable content. I'm sorry; I thought I installed the Mass Effect Trilogy box set that already included "THE COMPLETE MASS EFFECT SAGA"—now you're telling me I've got to log in somewhere and get the rest of it?

Fine. Let me waste five minutes trying to register for an account I apparently already have. There. Took long enough for the password reset e-mail to arrive. Logged in. WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO PURCHASE THE DLC? Another five minutes navigating the separate website that popped up in the middle of my game—why isn't the DLC downloadable from a sub-menu within the game, like with Mega Man 9 and 10? Ohhhh, I get it. There's extra DLC that wasn't included in the box set, presumably because it's brand-new. Interactive comic book? Don't need it. Let's get to playing the game already.

Incidentally, every time I've started up the game since, I've been delayed by a popup window telling me there's an error and I can't be logged in automatically to check for new DLC. Look, game, if I want to check for new DLC, I will tell you. Lay off.

ME2 gives you the option of importing your character from ME1 so that your decisions and appearance are preserved. I selected the option from the main menu to import my character. No saved characters found, the game told me. So back to the Internet I went, to determine whether it was my fault for not creating an ME1 save file correctly or ME2's fault for being inept. The consensus? It's not me, but ME, that's inept. Just find the configuration utility in the game folder and change the file path where ME2 looks for ME1 save games. Easy fix.

...Oh, but wait, says the Internet, don't use the configuration utility or else your game will fail to launch. Permanently. Even after reinstallation. Instead, simply copy/paste your save file into the folder where ME2 is looking by default.

Oops.

Thirty minutes of research and trial-and-error later, I was able to get my game running again, and it recognized my ME1 save. Highlights of this process include discovering my saved games in the My Documents folder, which is nowhere remotely close to where the rest of the Mass Effect files are found; deliberately defacing the contents of the game data folder to attempt an installation repair; and renaming the executable program file from whatever the configuration utility had changed it to so that I could launch my game again. Have I mentioned how much easier it is to get ancient games with timer issues that weren't even designed for modern operating systems to run on my computer?

Already I was cranky, what with it taking more than 40 minutes to get past the first screen. This game had better be worth it, I thought to myself. Import character, launch new game, let the pretty intro cutscene commence.

Let the spoilers commence, while we're at it. I'll try to keep them to a minimum, but I make no promises.

The cornerstone of the Mass Effect series is that you get to make the big decisions. Nothing in ME1 happens without the player having a say in the outcome—whether it's a simple choice about how to handle an obnoxious solicitor, or a no-win situation where two friends are in danger and you can only save one, you affect the outcome of each conflict. By the end of the opening cutscene of ME2, any sense of control, and any sense of connection with the first game, had been severed. My entire ship was destroyed, half my crew was dead, my main character was dead, and the only real choice I had been given was how quickly to rush to the exit.

I was cranky before; now I was angry. I liked that ship. I liked that crew. I liked...my...me. I don't care if it was a no-win scenario, and if all of that had to happen in order to advance the story—at least give me a chance to fight back, to save someone's life, to buy the ship a couple more minutes. Anything where I had the power to make a difference. ME2 made all the big initial decisions for me, and it was two years (in game time) until I had a say in the fate of the universe again. The opening cutscene set the tone for a darker, dystopian, and desperate Mass Effect universe where your choices only matter when the developers feel like it, and I just about walked away from it right there.

Except there was a fire in the lab where I was revived, and I had to escape before everything blew up.

Having learned from the configuration fiasco that delayed my entry into the first Mass Effect, I had held off from customizing the controls until the gameplay began. The moment I gained control of my character, I brought up the menu...and almost accidentally kicked myself out of the game. The appearance of the menu screen hadn't changed, but the placement of the buttons had—and "Exit Game" was now where "Save" and "Configure" used to be. Sure, because that's a necessary change. Let me close out of my game by mistake every time I go to save my progress.

This time I could customize my controls to my liking. I was disoriented for a few moments, getting used to the new menus and getting reacclimated to the familiar movement controls the last game had trained me not to use, all the while being bombarded with too much audio and visual stimuli—alarms and someone shouting at me and fire and explosions and I think even a countdown timer. It's all a bit of a blur. Bravo for an exciting start to the game, but...give the player a couple seconds to figure out whether they checked or unchecked the "Invert Mouse" box correctly before telling them they're about to explode.

Still reeling, I picked up a weapon and escaped from the room. Wait—why does it look like this pistol has an ammo limit? Nuts. One of the best things ME1 does with its combat is abolish the need for ammo with the weapons. Instead, weapons overheat and shut down for a few seconds if you hold down the trigger for too long. It's an elegant system that works well with the cover mechanic, because it keeps the focus on timing rather than resource management, and eliminates all the time you'd otherwise spend running around in search of tiny ammo clips.I'm not opposed to an ammo system, but ME1 introduced a combat mechanic that was unique, well-executed, and logically explained in the Codex; for ME2 to abandon all that for a generic ammo system is a major disappointment, and the in-game explanation for why we're suddenly using ammo clips is weak. ("Uh...guns will overheat if you fire them too much! So you need thermal clips to absorb excess heat so you can get back to firing again quickly! But...uh...don't ask us why a high-quality sniper rifle burns itself out after 10 shots without spare clips.") The dubious explanation is bad enough, but it's extra suspicious that some of the weapon upgrade descriptions ignore the "thermal clip" pretense entirely and just call it "ammo."

Then all the on-screen tutorials started popping up. And they lied to me. In an age where having customizable controls is the rule rather than the exception, it's not unreasonable to expect a game to tell you things like, "Press [KEY YOU'VE MAPPED TO OPEN DOORS] to open doors," rather than, "Press [DEFAULT KEY THAT IS NOW MAPPED TO MAKE YOU DANCE LIKE A CHICKEN] to open doors." Imagine my panic and confusion when robot soldiers were closing in on me and the game was popping up instructions in my face that I instinctively followed, getting myself into more trouble because of what those buttons had actually been mapped to do. And then imagine my panic and confusion later on when the game started telling me to right-click or left-click in the middle of a cutscene, even though the actions I was being prompted to execute weren't in my key configuration menu. Could I trust the popup, or was I accidentally going to skip the cutscene if I clicked?

And speaking of popups, the neat little popup list of XP gain, alignment points, and Journal/Codex updates that kept the first game's onscreen display clean and organized was gone. It had been replaced by a series of obtrusive popups conveying partial detail about every significant item and accomplishment...but the amount of detail is neither concise enough to read in the short time allotted, nor thorough enough to save you the trouble of opening your Journal/Codex to read more. It's not uncommon to come out of a cutscene or shop menu and have a good 30 seconds of popups obscuring your view and demanding your attention as new equipment and Paragon/Renegade points and quest updates parade by one at a time. ME1 does it right: one popup that pauses the game so you may review the items you've just picked up; one brief popup in the corner reminding you—at your convenience—to check your Journal/Codex for any entries listed as "NEW." The inelegant presentation of ME2's popups defeats their presumed purpose of conveying all that information without interrupting the action.

I somehow survived the initial excitement and saved my game the moment that option became available to me. Good thing, too; immediately thereafter I irrevocably failed a challenge to hack into a computer. The on-screen tutorial once again declined to convey exactly what keys I would need to navigate the minigame. I reloaded to try again, but I got to thinking about how I was able to attempt a hack in the first place. My character was a soldier, just like in ME1, where I had to rely on more tech-savvy party members to do all the computer work. Did she suddenly become an expert hacker? And whatever happened to Omni-Gel, another innovation from the first game, which allowed me to bypass hacking challenges altogether if I had a sufficient quantity? Absent. Gone. Another unique and effective game mechanic that was completely overhauled for the sequel. I was not liking this trend.

It wasn't long before I found myself in combat again, and now the onscreen tutorial was telling me to switch weapons to the grenade launcher. I brought up the tactical HUD, which had been logically (for a change) rearranged to have all squad members' weapons and abilities within easier reach of each other...but I didn't see a grenade launcher. There was just a picture of the pistol I was currently using. I tried clicking on the pistol, just in case I was mistaken about what grenade launchers looked like, and I was surprised to see that part of the HUD expand into a longer window that included both my pistol and my grenade launcher. I clicked the grenade launcher, and the window collapsed again so that only the grenade launcher was pictured. Well, that was inconvenient. Two clicks and a momentary hover to switch weapons (one for the HUD, one to open the weapon menu, and one to select the weapon)? Surely I could map each of my weapons to a hotkey instead.

Surely I expect too much from this game.

Every other first-person shooter I've ever heard of has had weapon hotkeys, ME1 included. And when my shotgun and grenade launcher both hold fewer than a dozen rounds (sorry--can only fire a dozen times before I run out of thermal clips), you can bet your sweet bippy I'll be swapping out guns frequently to make the most of my limited ammo. I can't even fathom how an oversight like this occurred.

No, wait. I can. I think I understand the underlying causes of the game's flaws. I think I understand why I was so eager to keep playing the game despite being even more disappointed and frustrated than I ever was with the first one. ME2 shows all the signs of a divided development team, with some people earnestly trying to improve on the original, and some people ignoring the original because they wanted Call of Duty in space. The whole thermal clip debacle is a prime example: the new gameplay doesn't flow logically from the old gameplay (who in their right mind would trade infinite ammo for limited ammo?), and the writers, who did a brilliant job explaining even the most trivial scientific details in ME1, practically concede in their explanation that the new gameplay doesn't make any sense within the context of the game universe.

I look at what ME2 does right: the sidequests are meaningful; there's a lower frequency of random equipment drops that prompt the player to reassess their entire team loadout; there's more complex combat that takes full advantage of the "hiding behind cover" mechanic; there's been a thorough streamlining of the technical issues that plagued ME1...hang on; that sounds exactly like everything I hoped for in a sequel. Practically without exception, ME2 fixes every single issue I had with the first game...which makes it all the more frustrating that there are still as many problems as before. ME2 learned all the right lessons from the worst parts of ME1, and then changed—rather than refined—all the best parts. ME2 relies very heavily on the player's immediate acceptance of different as better, and this is its greatest flaw.ME1 presents a game universe with heroes and villains, joy and sorrow, triumph and failure. It is a world of balance. As a Paragon, a Renegade, or something in-between, you bend the world around you to be as bright, dark, or gray as you wish it to be. ME2 presents a game universe with villains and worse villains, sorrow and worse sorrow, failure and worse failure. It is a world of ruin. As a Paragon, a Renegade, or something in-between, the world bends you to be a shade darker than you were before. ME2 is drastically grittier and more "adult" than its predecessor, but no attempt is made at a gentle transition in tone.The game is front-loaded with bitterness, loss, hostility, and mistrust, to the point where the Mass Effect universe you knew is almost unrecognizable; only after several hours and multiple missions to earn the loyalty of your squad does ME2 feel like a natural continuation of the first storyline. It's as if the game is screaming, "I'M MADE FOR GROWN-UPS!" like an insecure child, when it would be more compelling to gradually demonstrate its maturity as time goes on, like someone becoming an adult. ME2 forces the player to acclimate instantly to a harsh new reality, and that simply doesn't work if the player isn't already itching for a change. The game as a whole is so wrapped up in what the franchise should be that it forgets what it was, and the ravine that separates the two is awfully unpleasant to cross without a bridge in place.Look at the way the first game ends: it's an ending full of hope. Despite all the casualties, humanity has made a name for itself, Shepard has become a renowned hero with a greater purpose, and a new era is dawning. Then we start ME2 and all the warm fuzzies get blown up, Shepard wakes up in the hands of a shady organization responsible for atrocities in the first game, and the first people you meet are a gruff guy with daddy issues, an angry traitor, and a self-righteous know-it-all who shoots people in cold blood. You talk about a few of the major decisions you made in the first game, and they all seem to have backfired. The leader of the shady organization manipulates Shepard into doing his bidding, sends the team off to a dismal spaceport where people are dying of poverty and disease, and there they find nothing but vile mercenaries and crime lords. Almost every crew member Shepard recruits is a murderer, and even the former teammates whose paths Shepard crosses are angry, regretful, obsessed shadows of their former selves. Alcohol, tobacco, gore, and profanity—all but completely absent in the first game—are suddenly around every corner, not necessarily because they make sense to the story, but because this is a game for adults.Because when the usually mild-mannered Tali'Zorah begins to swear, it sounds like someone's forcing her to.It takes far too long for any sunshine to reach this corner of the Mass Effect universe, but when it does, you feel right at home again. As you get to know the characters, they seem less like thugs and more like real people with complex pasts and emotions. The personal messages you receive at your computer terminal grow to include heartwarming and sometimes hilarious notes from the people you encountered in the first game. Bright, beautiful locations begin to supplement the grungy, serious places you've seen so much of. The tone of the game is still considerably darker, and the gameplay is still notably different, but those little injections of continuity, joy, and optimism go a long way in being able to recognize the heart of the first Mass Effect underneath its own wreckage.The importance of positivity to the Mass Effect universe is something the people who crafted the Paragon responses would do well to remember. The Commander Shepard I led through ME1 was largely a goody two-shoes, always helping people in need, being kind and polite to people who didn't deserve it, and favoring diplomacy over violence. (Well, almost always, anyhow; once I discovered that Renegade actions fill up a separate meter rather than drag your Paragon score in the opposite direction, I'd occasionally be a bit of a rebel when my goody-two-shoery started to make even me sick.) This same "too good for her own good" Shepard is technically the same one I commanded through ME2, but you'd hardly know it from my actions. The Paragon path in the sequel looks less like the path of a hero and more like the path of a religious zealot who's starting to lose touch with what their religion actually teaches about being a good person.

Example: Shepard encounters a wounded mercenary who might possess some valuable information. If this were ME1, there'd be a Paragon option to politely scare him into talking, a neutral option to make overt death threats until he talks, and a Renegade option to kill him outright. But this is ME2, so everything has to be a little darker. "Paragon" now translates to "person who shoves wounded mercenaries against the wall, shouting at them threateningly until they comply, and then averring to her team afterward that she kind of enjoyed it." I'm sorry, this is not the same Commander Shepard who made a career out of using only her words to persuade the foulest villains to see reason. And let's not forget about all the Paragon options where Shepard overreacts about aliens adhering to anything other than traditional human morality before attempting to learn anything more about what she's rejecting. Is it so unrealistic to allow even the option of being gentle to your enemies and open-minded toward your friends? Or is this universe so far gone that heroism and goodness can only be expressed in displays of machismo and righteous xenophobia?It reached a point where I was receiving Paragon and Renegade points from the same conversation, and I had no idea which responses had earned me which. Every once in a while I caught a glimpse of the Shepard I remembered—her speech during the big trial scene would've made a Starfleet captain proud, for instance—but too often there was a disconnect between the responses I thought I was choosing and the responses I got. Like going into full-on flirtation mode with one of my crew members the first time I tried to talk with him on the ship. And every time after that. Shepard would suggestively slither up against a table and put on her "hey there, big boy" voice, WHICH IS TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE FOR INITIATING CONVERSATION WITH A SUBORDINATE WHOM YOU'VE JUST MET.To balance this out, the character with whom Shepard did end up pursuing a romantic relationship might as well have been a lampstand, for as intimate as they were together.I exaggerate a little, but it's striking to me that ME1 has a tasteful love scene that dares to show a little skin, while ME2—at least with the relationship I pursued—practically glosses over the whole thing. There had been a lot of funny discussion about how a romance between Shepard and her love interest—an alien—would present some logistical challenges, and I was kind of curious to see how they'd work it out. Intellectually curious, that is; I'm sure the Internet is full of pictures I don't need to see. The culmination of the romance subplot with this character started with a brief scene of Shepard—from the shoulders up—in the shower, and the rest of it played out like the beginning of Awkward Prom Night, faded to black at the first sign of physical contact, and was never referenced again. Not even the two of them sitting together over breakfast the next morning trying to hold hands or avoid eye contact. Yes, game. Now I'm convinced you're made for adults, forcing swearing, cigarettes, drunkenness, blood splatters, and piles of mangled corpses down the player's throat, and then getting all shy when two of your characters would realistically start to undress, share a tender moment together, and possibly talk about it afterward like mature individuals.There's so much about ME2 that just doesn't fit; so many elements that work fine on their own but don't mesh well with other elements. I look at the oversimplification of the weapons and character customization. You'd think that micromanaging equipment and abilities like in the first game would've been beneficial with ME2's more complex combat, but instead you've got no more than six or seven abilities to upgrade (only three, if you're looking at a squadmate who isn't loyal), and your weapon choices are limited to either "I'll go with the obvious upgrade" or "all of these are awesome; why can I carry only one." The new loading screens are artistically interesting, but they disrupt the consistently cinematic feel the first game had down from the get-go—particularly because they're far more abundant. Is it really that difficult to start loading the next area before you get there, especially if there's a cutscene first that can cover it up? And that's to say nothing of the mission reports that interrupt the gameplay at the conclusion of a major quest. Did I honestly need all that fanfare when I've still got half a space station to explore and unfinished business to attend to later with these NPCs?I look at how fluid Shepard's movement is in ME1, and how cumbersome she is in ME2—she runs around swaggering with her head pointed low and off to the side, and any attempts to pat someone on the back appear to be well outside her comfort zone. As illustrated in part by the new thermal clip system, resource management is a big part of ME2, but nobody ever tells you how expensive and unnecessary it is to strip mine all the planets in the galaxy, nor how much money you'll need in order to buy every item from every store. A completionist or thorough explorer such as myself will inevitably find that there is not enough money in the game to purchase everything available to you. ME1 lets you sell excess equipment or play quasar (read: space poker) when you're strapped for cash; your only recourse in ME2 is to repeatedly bet a pittance on a pit fight over which you have no control.Oh, there's that idea again: no control.Before embarking on my final mission, I took a peek at a walkthrough to see whether I'd missed any quests that would provide that last few hundred thousand credits I needed to finish buying all the upgrades I couldn't afford. Right away, I found a mission I hadn't completed: turns out there was one more team member to recruit. Who...is only available if you buy the DLC. I looked very carefully at the prerequisites for her quest to appear, and I had met all of them. Either my game had glitched, or else the compilation package I bought was missing another downloadable extra.This time I went directly to the DLC page of the ME2 website. And I almost wished I hadn't. There was that same comic book the game had prompted me to buy at the very beginning...alongside ten other expansion packs it never bothered to tell me about. Apparently "THE COMPLETE MASS EFFECT SAGA" includes the three base games and a few random pieces of DLC that are free to download. The really complete Mass Effect saga would cost me upwards of $90, which is triple what I paid for the three-game compilation pack.I wasn't kidding when I said resource management is a big part of ME2. Who has the budget for that anymore?I might've sprung for a few of the more substantial extras had the game told me about them instead of just the comic book, but at this point, I was ready to be done. Just when I had warmed up to the game, forgiven the initial separation trauma from the first game, and come to appreciate the new direction, I got the wind knocked out of me by a mandatory sequence every bit as horrible as that intro cutscene. The game manufactures a credibility-defying excuse to get every person with any combat ability off the ship, and then—surprise!—spoilers happen. One of the biggest events of the game, and Shepard is once again deprived of all ability to influence the outcome. I was simultaneously livid and vindicated. It wasn't my inability to get over my own expectations that had put a damper on the entire game. It was the developers' inability to settle on whether ME2, at its core, was all about what the players wanted to do, or what the developers wanted to do. That struggle reasserted itself at the wrong time for me to be considering giving BioWare and EA more money.Sorry, bonus crew member. Maybe I'll download you if I ever decide to replay the game as a Renegade. I shudder to think of how depraved that playthrough will be if my "Paragon" was any indication.It's all riding on ME3 now. The first game was very enjoyable, but could have been better. The second game was, at times, equally enjoyable, except it should have been better. The third game needs to be better.I think of ME1 and recall the immersiveness of the game universe, the care with which I leveled up my squad, the beautiful locations, the simple pleasure of running around with a tricked-out shotgun, and the tiresome visits to random planets with excessively mountainous terrain. I think of ME2 and recall, the needless negativity of the game, the constant lack of money and ammo, the recurring sense of powerlessness, repeatedly being mislead by the popups and the conversation wheel, the Game Overs that followed every attempt to get close enough to use my shotgun, and some really cool plot twists and action sequences. I know I enjoyed myself for portions of ME2, but it was more often despite the game than because of it. If ME3 is anything other than a cohesive synthesis or refinement of the two, then I will very likely consider this series a failure.Because if the story is the only part of the series that has a logical continuity, next time I'll buy the comic and skip the game.Next up: Mass Defect 3

One of my all-time favorite RPGs and video/computer games in general is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which—for me, at least—set a new standard for how immersive a game world could be. Before SW:KotOR (or just KotOR, because sometimes even abbreviations need abbreviating), it was generally an emotional connection with the characters, a large degree of freedom in my actions, or the overall atmosphere that got me immersed in a game. With KotOR, it was all of these plus one more key component: there were story-defining consequences to my actions.In any other RPG I'd played, consequences were typically limited to the gameplay: if I choose to burn through all my most powerful items in this boss fight, I might be ill-prepared for the next one; if I fail to explore the dungeon thoroughly enough, I'll miss out on some fun secret area. I'd learned to start being a jerk whenever somebody started asking me to save their missing cat or go on some silly quest to save the world, because I'd always be forced to choose "Yes" anyhow, and the responses my characters would give to weasel their way out were usually pretty entertaining. Every once in a while there'd be a Chrono Trigger or a Space Quest with one or two pivotal moments where you could alter the ending of the game, but by and large, the only consequences I ever faced were of no lasting impact to the story.KotOR made me choose. When there was a man being threatened in the street, I had to decide whether I'd swoop in to rescue him, walk past him quickly to avoid getting involved, or kill the assailants so I could threaten the man myself. I found myself invested in my character and the game world in a way I'd never been invested before, because I was actively shaping their development. You can play GoldenEye 007 and use the corpses of your enemies as target practice for throwing knives, but when a cutscene rolls around, you're still the good guy and not some twisted psychopath. You can play King's Quest and attempt to do cruel and unusual things to every person and creature you meet, but at the end of the adventure, you'll still be the pride of the kingdom. KotOR was the first game I'd played where even the most insignificant actions regularly had ramifications that wouldn't manifest until later on, and watching my decisions mean something got me hooked in a big way.A few years later, I started hearing about Mass Effect. I knew very little about it, other than that it was another sci-fi RPG made by BioWare—the same company behind KotOR—and that your decisions made some sort of cumulative impact, and that it was very pretty. At the time, "very pretty" equated to "no hope of running it on my computer," so I kept the game in the back of my mind for several years. During that time, I made it a point to avoid spoiling anything about the game for myself. I had to stay off the Internet for about a week when people made it to the apparently controversial ending of Mass Effect 3, which I still refuse to learn more about until I get there myself. When Mass Effect started coming up in conversation again recently on the blogs I follow, and when the realization began to sink in that my new (used) computer has been running almost nothing but '90s adventure games since I got it, I had no trouble picking out which PC game to start playing next.I had to restart the game three times before I got to the opening cutscene.Mass Effect has a number of customization options, but for once, overdoing it with the graphics wasn't to blame. Even at the maximum settings, the game runs perfectly on my new (old) rig. I'd made it part of the way through the cleverly immersive character creation process ("Sorry, Mr./Mrs. Shepherd; your personal file has been corrupted. Please help us recreate the data by making selections about your backstory, character class, and personal appearance.") and then the game froze. More accurately, it stopped responding normally to my input. I tried clicking on the new options being presented to me, but instead of making selections, my clicking simply moved the selection cursor up or down. How can I advance to the next screen if clicking on the option I want only makes the cursor jump to the next option?I did a forced shutdown of the game and booted it back up again. Maybe this was just a glitch; these things happen. I got back to the point where I got stuck before...and got stuck again. At this point, I was starting to suspect I'd somehow brought this upon myself, having spent a good 10-15 minutes fiddling with the settings before launching the character creator. Best to set everything back to the defaults and sort out the problem once I was into the game proper. Another forced shutdown.On my third attempt, after reverting all settings to their initial states, I was feeling more annoyed than immersed. What kind of game developer lets the player configure himself into a corner before the game even begins? My suspicions proved correct when I reached the point where I'd gotten stuck twice over, and suddenly I had no problems clicking on anything.What had happened, precisely? It all had to do with the way I'd mapped the mouse controls.For as long as I've been playing first-person shooters, the left mouse button has always moved me forward, and the right has always moved me backward. None of this WASD nonsense where there's no good way to reach half your hotkeys in combat; all my basic movement of looking and walking around is mapped to the mouse. I grew up on platformers, where precise movement is paramount—I've got greater control over where I'm moving by pointing my mouse in that direction than trying to nudge myself back and forth with the keyboard.That leaves my entire left hand free to use the entire keyboard for all other actions—CTRL for firing, SHIFT for running, SPACEBAR for interacting with objects, X for jumping, D for ducking, and all the surrounding keys for any extra options I might have. Again, platformers taught me how to do some combination of running, jumping, charging, firing, and sliding at the same time, so holding down two or three keys that are right next to each other is second nature to me. Plus, it's rare that a game either requires or allows you to take more than two or three actions at a time, so it's not a big deal if I have to stop firing for a split-second to activate my health recovery item that might require me to stop firing in the first place. I've still got full mouse control to wheel myself out of harm's way if I'm still under attack.Beyond that, I play most first-person shooters as a sniper, so having my gun trigger mapped to the left mouse button (which is usually the default) actually increases the chances I'll click too hard and throw off my aim. I don't care if it's weird; it's worked for every FPS I've ever played, and I can't be held responsible if you offer me the opportunity to map the Q key however I see fit. I've been alt-firing with Z and cycling through weapons with the mouse scroll wheel since 199X; it's too late to change those habits now.Unless those habits prevent me from getting through the first few screens of Mass Effect. For the first time in any game I have ever played, mapping movement to the left mouse button replaces your ability to make menu selections with the mouse. Instead, left-clicking moves the cursor up (like pressing the up arrow on the keyboard, typically reserved for moving your character forward), and right-clicking moves the cursor down (like pressing the down arrow on the keyboard, typically reserved for moving your character backward). Mass Effect interpreted my character movement preferences to apply to the menu screen as well. Left-clicking only made selections if it wasn't mapped to a movement command.I discovered SPACEBAR, my interaction key, could make selections on the menu screen. So...if I wanted to do this my way, I'd have to highlight my menu options (save, equip, level up, etc.) with the mouse, and then use the keyboard to select them. This system was awkward, to say the least, and it broke down entirely on the Codex sub-menus, which do not cooperate well with keyboard commands. A good 45 minutes into the first 10 minutes of the game, I gave up. No amount of comfort during the non-menu portions of the game was worth the utter inconvenience of having to handle the menu portions this way. I reverted the controls to their WASDefaults, gingerly adjusted some of the more obnoxiously placed controls, and made duplicate mappings of fire (default left click) and backpedal (default S) to CTRL and right click, respectively, where I knew I'd be reaching for them by mistake from time to time. I was not happy about this, but at least I was finally able to play.Once the initial irritation of the control fiasco began to subside, I found myself experiencing that same kind of immersion I came to love about KotOR. The graphics were indeed pretty, the voice acting was top-notch, the animations were fluid and realistic, the sound effects and music gave off all the appropriate vibes of being IN SPAAAAAAAAACE, and the intimations I'd heard about your choices potentially affecting the next two games in the series made every selection from those dialogue trees seem all the more important. I was hooked.Then they dropped me on a planet with two teammates I couldn't directly control, put a gun in my hands, and demolished any lingering misconceptions that combat was turn-based like in KotOR. I know I'd been configuring the game to play like an FPS, but I wasn't expecting it to be an FPS. Now the control situation had been upgraded from inconvenience to serious problem--how could I possibly survive an onslaught of enemies when I move when I want to fire, and fire when I want to move? How could I manage giving commands to my squad when I can barely manage giving commands to myself?In what is becoming an unpleasantly common occurrence, I bumped the combat difficulty down to the minimum. The controls were going to be a handicap; the least I could do was try to level the playing field. I engaged my first enemies with all the grace of a sedated water buffalo, but I survived. I knew I wouldn't be the crack shot I was in Elite Force and No One Lives Forever, but I'd at least be able to get by.The rest of my first game session went well. I emerged victorious from a few more battles, got a better feel for how the dialogue wheels worked (polite or friendly options at the top of the wheel, neutral options in the middle, rude or angry options at the bottom), read up on my galactic history in the Codex, and played around with leveling up my lead character (leaving my squadmates to automatically level up until I had any idea what any of their abilities meant). As had happened many times before with my KotOR sessions, I completely lost track of the time. The only reason I made it to bed on time that night was because I failed to disarm a bomb in time and was blown up, which is usually a good stopping point. I had spent several valuable minutes trying to find a way to get to the blinking beacon on my minimap, which I presumed to be a bomb, but was in fact a marker I'd accidentally placed in the middle of a wall while fumbling through my map screen. Only the best and the brightest are saving this galaxy.I'm now a fair portion into the game—I'd say halfway, but I'm not about to look it up and ruin the surprise—and I'm finding more and more that the interface is interfering with the immersion. My control scheme lacks the finesse to which I'm accustomed, so every combat situation ends up being less about tactics and more about brute force than I'd prefer. I could bump up the difficulty to "encourage" myself to be more tactical, but I'm concerned I'll end up dying more frequently than necessary because I'm still occasionally standing there trying to figure out why my gun is overheating when I'm supposed to be running forward.I'm encountering a similar problem with the decryption minigame where you essentially play Frogger, trying to move your cursor into the center of a circle while avoiding the blocks that move past. I'm fairly decent at Frogger, but my skill is hampered by the control. Sluggish mouse control makes it challenging to swing the cursor into position when there's a tight squeeze, and maneuvering around to the upper portions of the circle (where there may be less block traffic) takes even more time than it does to deal with whatever's in front of you at the bottom when you start. I don't even bother with the hardest decryption level anymore—under normal circumstances, I could probably crack it about half the time, but with these controls I don't stand a chance.Then there's the issue of inventory management. Any other RPG (hybrid FPS or not) will give you a master item/equipment list where you can see everything you have at once, and usually organize everything to some degree. Mass Effect only lets you see what equipment you have when you're on the tab to equip a character with that particular piece of equipment. For example, you can only see what pistols you have when you're getting ready to equip someone with a pistol, and even then, you'll need to scroll down on the page if you have any more than about four or five in stock. Annoyingly, equipment seems to be organized in the order everything was obtained, with no way to sort by name or strength. This gets to be problematic if you're trying to quickly sell off any duplicates you have of a particular item, because the shop menu isn't subdivided by category, so it's one long list of everything you own in the order you obtained it, with any duplicates being all over the list.Any quest-related items are only viewable by opening the associated quest record in your Journal...which is of no help whatsoever if you pick up a Turian Medallion of Gastrointestinal Fortitude or somesuch that pertains to a quest you had no idea existed.I'm also getting frustrated with how inconsistent the dialogue wheel is with adhering to its own rules about where certain kinds of responses should be placed. I'm going for a generally good character who always chooses the Paragon route over the Renegade route, though I'm not above being a little blunt or unfriendly from time to time if the situation calls for it; therefore, I should be sticking to the top and middle options on the wheel, and using the bottom options sparingly, right? Nope. At times, you've got as many as five different questions you can ask someone, all of which are completely prosaic, but they're scattered all about the wheel just so there's enough room for all of them. Other times, an option that looks absolutely harmless will be unexpectedly negative simply because it's on the bottom of the wheel, even when you just clicked on a different response in the same spot and had nothing negative come of it. I sincerely hope they streamlined this with the next game, because I'm tired of saving my progress before I talk to every single person, for fear I'll try to inquire about an alien's culture and end up insulting their mother and sparking a war with their people.Oh, and let's not forget about the numerous times I've put down my sniper rifle to find my ability to run or even jog has been completely revoked until I reload a saved game. Or all the times I've tried to skip through a line of longwinded dialogue and accidentally selected a dialogue option that wasn't even visible on the screen yet. Or the phenomenon where hitting an elevator button too quickly will lodge my squadmates in the corner of the elevator and keep the whole thing from moving while my main character is frozen helplessly in place until the elevator reaches its destination (which it never does).The Mass Effect universe is compellingly complex. The story, characters, technologies, locations, choices, and challenges are fun and interesting. The audio and visuals are top-notch. By all rights, I should be hopelessly immersed. Yet there's a stack of little things now towering high enough to cast a shadow on this otherwise brilliant game. It's difficult to get lost in a game when the elements that are supposed to blend into the background keep reminding you it is a game.Next up: Mass Defect 2

So wait. You're telling me that Star Wars: Episode VII, Ghostbusters III, Indiana Jones 5, and Beetlejuice 2 are all real movies that are happening or likely to happen in the next few years? Look, I'm all for a sequel if there's a good story to be told, but I think everybody missed the boat here. If we've learned anything from the likes of Star Wars: Episode I, Indiana Jones 4, and Terminator III, it's that sequels made 10+ years after the last installment consistently fail to resemble the movies they're following (which is occasionally advantageous; just ask Men in Black III or Rocky Balboa). More to the point, I'm concerned about this apparent resurgence of interest in continuing film franchises where half the people involved in the original film are either dead or of retirement age.You had all of the '90s, guys. This isn't some long-lost parent you reconnected with in the twilight years of their life; these are properties that have happily been in the public consciousness for decades, enjoying continuous merchandising and no end to the books and comics and video games that have continued the story you could've been telling on film this whole time. I don't pretend to know how long these filmmakers have been trying to make sequels to these films, but I have to imagine at least one of these planning sessions went something like, "Jeez, Harrison Ford's getting up there, isn't he? Guess we'd better start making sequels again before he's too old to lift a whip or a blaster. You know, I'd completely forgotten he was still acting until I saw a few minutes of Air Force One on TV last night. That was only from a couple years ago, right? He looks great!"There might be hope for Star Wars: Episode VII, which is being brought to us by the very same director who brought us the last two Star Wars movies (Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness). Otherwise, I'm skeptical. Unless the people involved—new and old—profoundly understand both what makes the originals good and how to effectively pick up with a story some 10, 20, even 30 years later, I think I'd rather save my money and catch Joe Dirt 2 whenever it arrives on Netflix.

In the 5+ years I've been blogging and making videos, I've been ad-free. No advertisements before my latest Mega Man playthroughs; no flashy widgets in the sidebar telling my readers they're the 10,000th person to be annoyed by this flashy widget today. I am not morally opposed to advertising, but there's never been a strong pull for me to don that sandwich board.It's been a matter of integrity: I like offering my content without any sense that I'm only doing it for the money. It's been a matter of consideration: my readers and viewers are bombarded by advertising everywhere else on the Internet; how refreshing it must be for them to have a break from that. It's been a matter of control: you can't always hand-pick what gets promoted on your site, and the last thing I need is for practically naked fantasy women to spoil the family-friendly appeal of my content, or for gross diagrams of some dude hacking up a lung discouraging even me from looking at my sidebar. It's been a matter of money: I haven't needed that extra income, at least not enough to compromise any of the aforementioned principles.Suddenly I'm planning for a trip overseas, and the thought of having enough money to eat there sounds appealing. I've toyed with the idea of enabling ads on my creative works before, but this is the first time I've ever given it any serious consideration. This is such a simple and obvious source of cash. How many hundreds—if not bajillions—of dollars have I willfully turned down in the past 5+ years?But then there are the ramifications of getting paid. Sure, Google. You've already got my personal e-mail, all of my YouTube videos, four years of blog posts, and probably my credit card details all under one roof. Let me give you my bank account, too. Then there's the paranoia that partnering with YouTube to put ads on my videos will draw more attention from the copyright infringement watchdogs. I suspect "fair use" doesn't hold up so well if I'm profiting from videos that are of fuzzy legality to begin with. Is all this, plus the compromise of the twice-aforementioned principles, worth the $100 that I might get paid by the time I'm ready to go on the trip that's prompted this idea in the first place?An alternative is Patreon, a site that allows fans to become patrons of their favorite content creators, paying them whenever they release new material. I'd need to look more closely at the logistics, but this sounds much more my style. The only problem? From what I understand, creators also need to generate additional exclusive content for their patrons to make it worth their while. I'm barely able to crank out a new video every 1-2 months, and I'm already giving my Facebook followers little tidbits they won't get elsewhere; now I need to figure out more ways to reward and entertain my supporters?Maybe I'm better off playing the lottery.

Well, Google, you win. I've resisted you at every turn, publicly decried your decisions and methods, and conscientiously objected to your unwelcome changes with whatever clever subversions I could muster. Finally you've made it so inconvenient to not have Google+ that any further resistance would defeat the purpose of using your services in the first place.I couldn't comment on my own videos. I had dozens, if not hundreds, of unanswered questions and dangling conversations from my viewers that begged for a response, and you took away my right and privilege to communicate if I didn't sign up for Google+. But then you nullified those conversations without warning—suddenly, Google+ or not, it was physically impossible to respond to any comments posted before a certain date. Was this part of the plan all along, or were you so eager to push your unloved Facebook competitor on us that streamlining the transition didn't matter?I resented the theft of my voice. I ran out of ways to be upset at you, Google. First the obnoxious popups about connecting my accounts, then the subterfuge that led me to unwittingly set up a Google+ account, then the horrendously organized options pages that brought me this close to inadvertently deleting my entire YouTube channel, then the denial of my basic ability to talk to my fans without playing your little game, then the denial of my basic ability to talk to my fans who'd been waiting for months or merely minutes for a response. No amount of resistance, criticism, or outright complaining could satisfy my rage. I had been grumpy before about change for the sake of change; this time your agenda was clear, and this time, I was angry. This is not the creature of habit talking who'd prefer to leave well enough alone; this is the person who despises being bullied and taken for a fool by someone he trusts.Today, I grudgingly but willingly signed up for your Google+. Today, you deprived me of one of the greatest joys I have from making videos: checking my e-mail the day after posting a long-awaited video to discover a deluge of subscriber and comment notifications, and taking my time to read through and appreciate each and every one. Today, after posting a video that's been in the works for two months, my inbox was empty.I don't receive notification e-mails if I'm not signed up for Google+, you see, despite there being e-mail notification options in YouTube whether I've connected Google+ or not. You ever put on a performance only to have the audience stare at you instead of clap when you're finished? That's what this felt like. And navigating to the comments section of the video to see if anybody had said anything was like listening to the audience members talk amongst themselves on their way out of the theater. I was no longer involved in my own videos. I had become a cyber stork who left newborn videos on my subscribers' doorsteps before disappearing from their lives. So I swallowed my righteous pride and admitted defeat. Making videos isn't worth the effort without the human connection, but the human connection, I thought, might be more important than refusing to compromise my principles in the face of a corporation who isn't even listening.I had fun populating my Google+ page with ridiculous information, claiming to be a Super Fighting Robot who works at Dr. Light's Lab and who went to school for special weapons use at the Challenge stages of Mega Man 10. Under better circumstances, Google could have persuaded me to at least create an account for the sake of better publicity—after all, I signed up for Twitter, which I neither like nor fully understand, so that people who prefer Twitter can get automatic updates about my blogging and YouTube activity that way. I'm not unwilling to try new things, but their value needs to be made clear to me if they're not forced upon me. As it stands, I feel dirty for joining Google+ because I neither wanted to nor was truly forced to. It's a little like being blackmailed—do I give in to the villain's demands to maintain the status quo, or do I preserve my sense of morality at the expense of something potentially greater?I started to get anxious when, after two hours of setting up Google+, I still wasn't receiving e-mail notifications—as though I'd sacrificed my principles for nothing. That situation righted itself after enough time had passed, but I'm still finding brand-new comments I cannot respond to, and if I never have to wade through all those settings menus again, it'll be too soon. To me, that's the big tip-off that Google+ was never intended to be so integrated with YouTube: multiple settings menus that all seem to say the same thing and have a delay of several hours before the changes in one place take effect at the other place.So I'm on Google+ now. It's not the end of the world. Maybe I'll end up using it or even liking it. One thing's for certain, though: Unless Google gets their act together and either streamlines or apologizes for this mess, it won't take much for a man who's already abandoned his principles to abandon the company that pushed him over the edge.